| Wax. The mere thought of this substance brings back floods of childhood memories. Memories of brightly colored wax crayons that we used to give our very own individual touches to the white, wood-chip wallpaper in our bedrooms. The strong fragrance of beeswax candles, which were only used around Easter time, seems to hang in the air again. We think back fondly to the flicker of a red candle in the days leading up to Christmas, as the flame made an ever deeper crater in the wax. Could it really have been that long ago that we would test our courage by catching hot molten wax in our palms, then letting it slowly solidify, kneading it as it hardened, and finally, carefully melting it in the flame again? And what about that unforgettable smell of floor wax conjuring up recollections of our first day of class in the venerable old schoolhouse. Oh yes, we soon become glassy-eyed when we think back to the waxes of our childhood – before we are shaken from our reverie without mercy by a modern realist. |  |
Sebastijan Bach is one of these realists. “This here is wax,” the application engineer says with a grin, holding out a slightly translucent material the size of a box of aspirin. It looks a lot like Plexiglas, but it is not transparent enough, and it is also too soft. Surprisingly, it is actually wax. “And this is, too,” Sebastijan Bach adds, pulling two tiny bottles from his sample case and shaking small pastilles onto the table, inviting his visitor to suck and bite down on them. “Don't worry,” the engineer reassures his visitor, “they aren't poisonous.” So let's suck it and see what happens. The first one feels like a hardened Gummi Bear. Bite down a little harder, the visitor thinks, and it could be bitten in two. Not the second pastille, though, not without breaking teeth. The second one feels hard and brittle. “It is precisely this variation that is the key to the wax's appeal,” Sebastijan Bach exclaims, because this stuff on our tongue is no ordinary wax, it is a “designer wax” – a substance that can be tailored precisely to meet the most diverse user requirements.
The magic word is Licocene, and it refers to a range of fully synthetic polyolefin waxes that are produced by metallocene catalysis. With metallocene catalysis, the most important product properties such as hardness, melting point and viscosity can be adjusted precisely over an extremely broad spectrum , and they can be combined in versatile ways. This offers a wide range of possibilities for matching a wax's properties to the processes and applications of each customer – “exactly your chemistry”, so to speak. There are few products for which the Clariant slogan is more appropriate than the new metallocene waxes. While the choices are extensive as it is, they become virtually limitless due to a chemical modification of the waxes.
Customized properties are possible, because the sandwich-like molecular structure of a metallocene – which functions something like a multipurpose tool- box for molecular design – permits the synthesis of any number of new waxes, each made to optimally meet individual requirements. The flexibility of Clariant’s new product will be of particular benefit to the plastics and adhesives industries, which are currently based mostly on the traditional Ziegler-Natta catalysis. “This is a unique process, not carried out anywhere else in the world,” stresses Uwe Nickel, the Head of the Pigments & Additives Division which is responsible for the production of the waxes. |